Atticus Finch

by Joseph Crespino

  In Monroeville, only a few weeks after Edwin Lee’s funeral, Whatley preached a Labor Day sermon quoting from Isaiah about workers enjoying the fruits of their labor—“They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat”—applauding gains won through collective bargaining, which helped protect workers, he said, from the lures of communism. Whatley wouldn’t have known about the dozens of editorials that A. C. Lee, his pastoral relations committee chairman, had written in the 1940s decrying the undue influence of labor unions, nor the efforts that A. C. and other locals had taken to ensure that Vanity Fair, the economic lifeblood of Monroeville, didn’t unionize. The preacher gave what he felt was a fair account of Christian principles applied to industrial relations.

  From the pews, however, his sermon would have come across very differently. A. C. Lee would have heard a young man moralizing about complex matters with which he had no practical experience. If A. C. Lee wanted to hear political speeches, he’d have gone to the courthouse. He came to church to do as the apostle Paul had admonished the Philippians, to think on those things that were true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable. His favorite hymn, “Dwelling in Beulah Land,” which he would sing in his bumblebee bass, captured the vision of God’s reward for the faithful. His Sunday mornings were a little slice of that, a place where “doubt and fear and things of earth in vain to me are calling, none of these shall move me from Beulah Land.”

  The next year Lee gave a speech at a Methodist conference gathering that reflected his views on the intersections of church and politics. He emphasized how God had created man in his own image, with free will. The system of government in the United States, Lee argued, protected the individual exercise of freedom to an unprecedented degree in human history. But those protections were imperiled in numerous ways: by the decline of statesmanship, by the philosophy that government exists not for the public good but to allow politicians to win spoils for their favored groups, by the selfishness that had infected politics, symbolized by labor bosses, by the usurpation of basic freedoms, symbolized by the FEPC, and by the subtle, gradual, creeping spread of philosophies that led toward communism. All of these were pet themes from the last several years of Lee’s editorship. So if Ray Whatley didn’t know about his pastoral relations chairman’s politics before, after this speech he knew.

  Yet Reverend Whatley stayed the course. He was not unduly concerned with A. C. Lee. He forged ahead with his ministry and continued to deliver sermons similar to his Labor Day address. A sermon on Race Relations Sunday, the Sunday once a year designated by the Methodist Church to collect offerings for Methodist-sponsored black colleges, noted that white people made up only one-third of the world’s population, and reflected on how acts of discrimination in Alabama could be used “to try to convince yellow and brown people of Asia and black people of Africa that injustice to minorities is the rule in America.”

  It was in his role as pastoral relations chairman that A. C. Lee eventually requested a meeting with Whatley. He advised him that his committee, representing the congregation as a whole, felt that Whatley should “‘preach the gospel’ and stay off social issues.” Relations between pastor and congregation deteriorated. In 1953, before the next annual conference meeting, two years before Whatley’s regular term ended, the pastoral relations committee petitioned that Whatley be reassigned, and that the preacher in Selma, who the church had initially requested and was now available, be sent to Monroeville. Whatley believed that Chairman Lee had violated church procedure in making this request without first consulting him. He explained this to the committee, in rather heated fashion. Lee became rather heated himself, and defended his committee’s actions. The two men eventually cleared the air in an exchange of letters. They saw each other not too long afterward at a meeting of the conference pension board, on which they both served. When some of the board members went out to lunch after the meeting, Lee made a point of paying for Whatley’s lunch, which Whatley appreciated as a gesture of reconciliation.

  Ray Whatley left Monroeville for St. Mark’s Methodist in Montgomery. He would go on to play a minor role in one of the great moral and political dramas of twentieth-century America. In early 1955, in an effort to help establish communication between the white and black communities in Montgomery, Whatley helped organize a Montgomery chapter of the Alabama Council on Human Relations. He was elected president. Serving as vice-president was a young black minister new to town who had just taken over the pastorate of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. In December a local black seamstress refused to give up her seat to a white passenger, sparking a bus boycott among Montgomery blacks. Whatley’s vice-president, Martin Luther King Jr., became head of the organization coordinating the boycott. As president of the Human Relations Council, Whatley issued a number of public statements recognizing the just demands of the boycotters and urging city leaders to negotiate. Again he found himself in hot water with his congregation. He was reassigned to a small church in the Black Belt town of Linden, which proved more hostile even than Montgomery and Monroeville. Martin Luther King Jr. informed his former professor, L. Harold DeWolf at the School of Theology at Boston University, of Whatley’s ordeal, and DeWolf wrote with offers to help get Whatley assigned to a church in the North. But Whatley declined. He moved on to a church in Mobile, where again he lent controversial public support to efforts to desegregate the city buses, and eventually, to a position on the Methodist General Board of Pensions, headquartered in Evanston, Illinois, lending some credence perhaps to Watchman’s fictional evocation of a man possessing “all the necessary qualifications for a certified public accountant.” Yet it must be said, though Harper Lee herself never seemed to recognize it, that Ray Whatley was a genuine, true-life example of the heroic figure that Mockingbird would eventually evoke to such everlasting fame: the principled white southerner who made a public stand for racial decency and fairness and suffered because of it.

  Whatley continued to see the Lee family on trips back to Monroeville, where he visited his brother Joe, who worked at a bank on the square. The Whatleys and the Lees remained friends, in all of the complicated ways that people did in small towns. One of Ray Whatley’s prized possessions was his copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, which Harper Lee signed to him and his wife “with admiration and affection.” Whenever she went to New York, Nelle left her car in the large driveway of Ray’s brother Joe, so that Alice would have more room for her car in the narrow driveway of the Lee home on West Avenue. In 1981, at the Methodist annual conference, it was Alice Lee, having taken over her father’s role as a regular lay delegate from Monroeville, who presented Whatley with a plaque honoring him for his long service on the pension board.

  The entire quarrel between Reverend Whatley and A. C. Lee would have been lost to history had not Harper Lee’s biographer, Charles Shields, stumbled upon Whatley in 2004 while cold-calling names from a list of Huntingdon College alumni who were in school the same year as Nelle Lee. Whatley had completed his undergraduate degree at Huntingdon after the war through a special program that allowed men to attend. Whatley told Shields that he didn’t have any memories of Nelle from college, but he did know the family from his time serving the church in Monroeville. When Shields’s book was published in 2006, with the revelations about Whatley’s run-in with A. C. Lee, Nelle vented privately in a letter to a friend. “Rev. Ray Whatley… thinks my father got him fired because he was ‘liberal’ at the wrong time,” she wrote. “He may have been but what got him fired—and this doesn’t seem to have occurred to him—was that he was a lousy pastor, totally unsuited for the ministry, who belonged at a desk—where he spent his career, serving his Lord working with pension plans and doing a great job.” More than fifty years after the events in question, old grudges died hard for Nelle Lee, particularly when they involved a slight to her father.

  PART II

  ATTICUS IMAGINED

  Chapter 3

  Setting a Watchman

  Nelle Harper walked aroun
d the block twice before entering the building. That’s how nervous she was the first time she visited the office of Maurice Crain and Annie Laurie Williams. Yet in only a matter of weeks, as Nelle started dropping by at regular intervals with new manuscript pages, it seemed like they were all old friends. Crain and Williams were the first people outside of Nelle’s tight circle to read her stories and affirm her talent. Both native Texans from farming and ranching communities, they had been charmed by the “nice little Suth’n gal—from Alabama” who “says Yes, Mam and No Mam.” In the years to come Nelle would decamp for long stretches to their stone cottage in Connecticut to write. Crain and Williams hosted Nelle and her sisters there, and even accompanied them on one of their annual sisters’ trips, a steamboat cruise on the Mississippi River.

  Because Watchman is not nearly as well-known as Mockingbird, a brief description of the novel that she was writing in early 1957 is in order. The book opens with the twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch, a struggling writer in New York, on the train home to Maycomb. She is met by Henry Clinton, a childhood friend and suitor, who has risen above his station by getting a law degree and joining the firm owned by her father. Jean Louise’s aunt, Alexandra, has moved in to help with Atticus, who has become enfeebled by arthritis and other ailments. She is the same grating presence, only older, that she is in Mockingbird. A sense of loss pervades the home after the recent, unexpected death of Jean Louise’s older brother Jem. Atticus, though physically weakened, is still wry, lively, and loving. The novel turns when Jean Louise discovers a racist, right-wing book among his reading materials. She heads immediately to the county courthouse where Atticus and Henry had gone to a meeting. Looking on from the balcony, she discovers that it is a gathering of the White Citizens’ Council. The rest of the novel tracks her outrage and disbelief that her wise and loving father would take up with such bigoted malcontents. She has a series of contentious conversations with, first, her uncle Jack—a doctor who is a more loquacious, outlandish version of Atticus—then Henry, and, finally, Atticus himself. Each man explains to Jean Louise the impossible position in which the reasonable, decent white southerner has found himself. She remains furiously unsympathetic until another turn at the end of the novel forces her to reconsider her views.

  Nelle started writing Watchman after the Browns’ 1956 Christmas gift, which came on the heels of a long stretch that she had spent at home in Monroeville helping to care for A. C., who had had a heart attack. It was his first major health crisis, and his recovery was painful and slow. The cortisone injections that he had been taking for over a year for his arthritis had caused internal bleeding. The doctors stopped the injections immediately, which left him terribly weak and in great pain. On top of that, he developed a stomach ulcer, which limited him to small meals every two hours. The medicines he had to take ruined his appetite and sense of taste, so that he ate mostly baby food. He required constant care, and was only able to get out of bed and shuffle to the living room a few times a day, where he typically would work a crossword puzzle. He didn’t have the strength to hold a book.

  The handful of letters that survive from this period suggest that the portrait of the emotionally torn Jean Louise in Watchman—she feels guilty about not being home enough to help with Atticus, yet is frustrated by small town life—is pretty close to how Nelle herself felt at the time. Nelle wrote to friends in New York that it was “excruciating” to sit through an hour of conversation with old high school acquaintances, an experience that she would fictionalize in Watchman. Yet her father’s illness, and her willingness to forgo the pleasures of New York to stay in Monroeville to help care for him, gave Nelle a seriousness of purpose and brought a new level of maturity. “I’ve done things for him that I never remotely thought I’d be called upon to do for anybody, not even the Brown infants, but I suppose there is truth in the adage that you don’t mind it if they’re yours,” she wrote. In another letter she described “staring at his handsome old face, and a sudden wave of panic flashed through me, which I think was an echo of the fear and desolation that filled me when he was nearly dead.” To her friends she recounted a humorous story about A. C. sneaking out to check the gas meter, falling over on the grass, and crawling to a tree to pull himself up. He was “so charming in the telling of it that I did not have the heart to fuss at him,” she wrote. Solving a crossword puzzle perhaps, he quizzed her one afternoon, asking who Josip Broz was. Nelle said she didn’t know. “Tito, hah,” he answered. She had not lived with her father on a day-to-day basis in years, she observed in one letter. “These months with him have strengthened my attachment to him, if such is possible.”

  Racial politics at the time were important as well in shaping the novel that Nelle was writing. 1956 was the year that massive resistance began in earnest in Alabama. The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education two years earlier had prompted immediate, outraged commentary throughout the state, but organized resistance to Brown emerged more slowly. It originated in the Black Belt, and its engine was a new organization, the White Citizens’ Council. In early 1956, during the Montgomery bus boycott, the number of Council chapters in that city exploded. Most pivotal in stoking militant resistance in the state, however, was the desegregation of the University of Alabama. When Autherine Lucy enrolled in February 1956, riots broke out on campus days later. Their size and vehemence shocked the nation. University leaders, receiving no help from either state or federal officials, suspended Lucy, ostensibly for her own safety. Yet the message to the militant mob was clear: violence and intimidation worked. There would be much more to come.

  Students at the University of Alabama burn desegregation literature to protest the enrollment of the school’s first black student, Autherine Lucy, February 6, 1956. (Associated Press)

  These developments drew intense media coverage, and one need not have been a white militant in 1956 to be defensive about the bad press white Alabamans received in the nation’s newspapers. In the first conversation between Atticus and Jean Louise in Watchman, before leaving for his law office, Atticus asks abruptly, “[H]ow much of what’s going on down here gets into the newspapers.” Jean Louise acknowledges the negative coverage in the New York Post, which suggests that Nelle had been reading the Montgomery Advertiser while home in Monroeville in 1956. In the spring of that year, a friendly rivalry developed between Post reporters and Advertiser editor Grover C. Hall Jr., the dandyish, bachelor son of A. C. Lee’s fellow newspaperman and occasional antagonist, Grover C. Hall Sr. Hall, whose newspaper office was inundated by national and international reporters setting up shop to cover the bus boycott, was convinced that white southerners weren’t getting a fair shake in the stories being written. He voiced these concerns frequently, and even began a series of editorials on racial disturbances in northern cities, a campaign that actually provoked an introspective series of articles at both the Post and the New York Times. Setting straight “the North” about what was really going on down South would be a major theme of Watchman as well. Nelle wanted to explain to readers of newspapers like the New York Post why they shouldn’t write off men like Atticus Finch.

  IT’S NOT SURPRISING that in January 1957, when thinking about how to dramatize the politics of the small town South, Harper Lee would ground her story in the rise of the Citizens’ Council. For the past year, the organization had been at the center of a political struggle taking place among whites in Alabama. Rival factions vied for control of the Councils, and thereby for the leadership of the massive resistance movement.

  The Citizens’ Councils originated in the Mississippi Delta, but they spread quickly to neighboring states, including Alabama. Sometimes they advertised themselves as the White Citizens’ Councils, to make clear that local blacks were not invited, but some members frowned on that qualifier as unnecessary and uncouth. Journalists, eager to make things plain for their readers, spread the name White Citizens’ Councils. From the start, Citizens’ Council leaders were obsessed with what the young David Halbers
tam called “an almost self-conscious desire for respectability.” They were determined to distinguish themselves from the Klan. “None of you men look like Ku Kluxers to me,” a founding Council member proclaimed to an audience in late 1954. “I wouldn’t join a Ku Klux—I didn’t join it—because they hid their faces; because they did things that you and I wouldn’t approve of.” Another founder warned that if “our highest type of citizenship” didn’t take the lead in maintaining segregation and “the integrity of the white race,” then the wrong crowd would, and “violence and bloodshed” would ensue.

  Violence was something the responsible men who now flocked to the Citizens’ Councils frowned upon. But economic intimidation of black families who joined desegregation lawsuits was another matter. As a Council leader in Selma put it, “We intend to make it difficult, if not impossible, for any Negro who advocates de-segregation to find and hold a job, get credit or renew a mortgage.” So too was the silencing of white moderates whose independence of mind might threaten the perception so critical to resistance leaders that the white South was united in the fight against integration. These ends the Citizens’ Councils pursued with vigor. Influential southern newspaper editors dubbed the organization the “white-collar Klan.”